That’s the Rick Santorum that America has come to know over the last
15 years or so – an unapologetic and almost goofy culture warrior whose
obsessions – like thinking that gay sex is a gateway drug to bestiality –
make him a hero to social conservatives and often a laughing stock to
most everyone else. Santorum’s rise in the 2012 presidential race has
people talking about whether his views on social issues – talk of annulling gay marriages, seemingly questioning the right to even birth control --- make him too extreme to be president – and that’s an important topic to discuss.

But I also think Santorum’s weird sexual bluster can obscure who he
really is, and what truly matters about his suddenly surging campaign.
As a Philadelphia-based political reporter, I arrived in town just seven
months after Santorum became my state’s junior senator. I followed his
12 years on the Washington political stage closely, and I think people
obsessing on the “man-on-dog” stuff are missing the bigger picture. For
one thing, the self-styled “family values” expert has a surprisingly
ambiguous record with his own personal ethics. Also, Santorum’s
legislative record shows that his real workaday agenda was not so much
waging culture wars as protecting the interests of the 1 Percent, the
millionaires and billionaires who funded the modern Republican Party.
You could say that Rick Santorum is just another politician. But that
would be giving him too much credit.

Here’s a Pennsylvanian’s brief guide to the Rick Santorum you don’t know:

1. This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam.
In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around
the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable
foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its
first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000,
Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1
million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum’s political fund
raising. Where did the majority of the charity’s money go? In salary and
consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides
and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum’s
finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican
National Committee. When I reported on Santorum’s charity for The American Prospect in 2006,
experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of
its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for
Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity –
which didn’t register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under
the law --- was finally disbanded in 2007.

2. Likewise, a so-called “leadership PAC” created by Santorum
that was supposed to fund other Republicans instead seemed to mostly
pay for the lifestyle of Santorum and those around him. My investigation of the America’s Foundation PAC showed
that only 18 percent of its money went to fund political candidates,
less -- and typically far less -- than any other “leadership PACs.” What
America’s Foundation did spend a lot on with what looked like everyday
expenses, including 66 trips to the Starbucks in Santorum’s then
hometown of Leesburg, Va., multiple fast-food outings and expenditures
at Wal-Mart, Target and Giant supermarkets. Campaign finance experts
said the PAC’s expenses – paid for by donations from wealthy businessmen
and lobbyists – were “unconventional,” at best and arguably not legal.
Santorum also funded his large Leesburg “McMansion” with a $500,000
mortgage from a private bank run by a major campaign donor, in a program
that was only supposed to be open to high-wealth investment clients in
the trust, which Santorum was not, and closed to the general public.

7. The defender of family values was also slavish in his devotion to a large American corporate behemoth, Wal-Mart: In the wake of the report about Santorum's travel in the Wal-Mart corporate jet, I counted the many ways that Santorum had done the bidding of the world's largest retailer in the Senate,
including battling to limit any increases in the minimum wage and
seeking to make changes in overtime rules that woulld benefit the
company and hurt its blue-collar workforce, tort reform to limit
lawsuits against what is said to be the world's most-sued company, and
changes in charitable giving laws and of course eliminating the estate
tax that would benefit the billionaire heirs of Sam Walton.

The real Rick Santorum is indeed a frothy mixture -- of
self-interest, loose ethical standards, and careerism in a career that's
been largely devoted not so much to the social causes about which he
makes headlines as looking out for the interests of big corporations and
the wealthiest 1 Percent of Americans. It's a shame that more voters
don't know that yet. That is the "Google problem" that Santorum actually
deserves.

Posted by Will Bunch @ 11:08 PM

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